New Villains After Hours at Magic Kingdom
Beginning this summer at Walt Disney World, the new Villains After Hours event will occur in Magic Kingdom. In this post, we’ll share the entertainment lineup, dates for the hard ticket party, and offer some thoughts, including how this compares to Villains Unleashed, a one-off special event at Disney’s Hollywood Studios a few years ago. (All but one of the photos in this post are from that event–I finally have an excuse to post them!)
First, the basics. Disney Villains After Hours will be held on select nights from June 6 through August 8, 2019. The event will offer a villains theme, with exclusive entertainment including an all-new stage show, food & beverage, merchandise, and more.
Disney Villains After Hours is being marketed as a summer twist on the normal After Hours at Magic Kingdom event. To us, it sounds more like a cross between After Hours and Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, arguably bearing more in common with the latter. Given its summer timing, it’s probably occurring because it’s simply too early (even by Walt Disney World standards) to start an event with “Halloween” in the name in June…
For those who are unfamiliar with the ‘After Hours’ component, it’s a limited capacity event promising low wait times at over 20 attractions and experiences in Magic Kingdom (it’s also offered at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom).
Disney After Hours started a couple years ago and has grown in popularity since. The event allows entry at 7 p.m., which gives time to watch Happily Ever After before doing attractions. Unlimited ice cream, popcorn, and bottled beverages are also included in the cost of the event.
Rides open during Disney After Hours include Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Space Mountain, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, and more. Typically, wait times peak at 30 minutes for the most popular attractions, with many attractions being walk-ons during the party.
Presumably, you’re familiar with the popular hard ticket Halloween Party at Magic Kingdom. If not, we have a comprehensive 2019 Guide to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party that covers all of the basics, plus much more.
As for the unique offerings that Disney Villains After Hours brings to the table, here’s what we know so far based upon Disney’s official announcement…
There will be an all-new Disney Villains stage show called “Villains Unite the Night” featuring Hades and Meg from Hercules as they set the castle stage ablaze.
This will also include appearances by Jafar, The Queen, Dr. Facilier, Maleficent, and other villains.
Another intriguing piece of entertainment is that the Maleficent the Dragon float from Festival of Fantasy parade at Magic Kingdom will be “let loose” for the first time at night.
This Steampunk style float will breath fire as it creeps through the park in a one-of-a-kind experience for party guests. It’ll be interesting to what degree this float is actually free roaming. Probably not much at all, especially given the whole “breathing fire” thing and the incident last year.
As with Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, there will be a couple of attraction overlays. For the Disney Villains After Hours event, there will be villains-inspired additions to Pirates of the Caribbean and Space Mountain.
Note that these are two of the three attractions that had Halloween overlays last year, with a different slate of attractions rumored to be receiving Halloween overlays. This makes sense now, as it would be a way to differentiate the two events.
Finally, there will be a variety of “wickedly good” special food & beverage offerings, including tasty desserts, drinks, and dishes inspired by The Queen, Cruella de Vil, Maleficent, Hades, Dr. Facilier, Emperor Zurg, and more.
Along with this, there will be new logo merchandise for Disney Villains After Hours, as well as items from a curated collection of the best Disney Villains merchandise available.
Disney Villains After Hours tickets cost $139 in advance or $144 on the event night (plus tax). Annual Passholder and Disney Vacation Club Members can save $30 per ticket. Tickets for Disney Villains After Hours event nights will go on sale April 29, 2019.
Alright, now for some commentary. My first thought upon seeing this announcement is that it’s very reminiscent of Villains Unleashed, an event that took place at Disney’s Hollywood Studios a few years ago. That one-night event featured a stage show hosted by Hades, included appearances by 50 villains (many rare), Oogie Boogie’s Freaky Funhouse Show, and the Villainy in the Sky Fireworks.
Depending upon who you ask, it was either an unmitigated disaster (pretty much everyone but me) or one of the zaniest and most envelope-pushing things (my take) Walt Disney World has done in recent memory. While billed as a one-night event, it was a test to see if themed nights like this would work, with other concepts planned for the future.
Before the night was even over, it was abundantly clear that Villains Unleashed was a train wreck, and definitely a one-and-done.
I distinctly remember watching Oogie Boogie’s Freaky Funhouse Show and thinking, “this is excellent, but I can’t believe they’re doing it!” as a constant stream of families fled towards the exits (that’s not an understatement).
It turns out that having a risqué stage show was the least of the problems for Villains Unleashed. While there were a ton of meet & greets, those offerings have a very low hourly capacity, and most guests who bought tickets were huge character fans.
Imagine an event where every single character meet & greet has lines on par with the Seven Dwarfs or Jack Skellington during the holiday parties, and you have a rough idea of how this went. Suffice to say, the Guest Relations line at the end of the night was quite long.
I wasn’t there to meet any characters, so that didn’t bother me–in fact, it helped. Crowds throughout the park were non-existent because most other guests were in those lines.
Personally, I found the production values on all of the entertainment to be top notch. While I can recognize that they went a bit too far with Oogie Boogie’s Freaky Funhouse Show, I enjoyed it.
Irrespective of individual experiences, I think it’s pretty undeniable that there were some good ideas behind Villains Unleashed.
Unfortunately, those ‘good idea nuggets’ were buried under an avalanche of poor planning, event execution, capacity issues, and pushing the envelope of what’s appropriate at a park with “Disney’s” in the name.
My suspicion and hope is that Walt Disney World’s entertainment and events teams learned from what worked and didn’t with Villains Unleashed. Ideally, they are cherry-picking the best ideas from that for Disney Villains After Hours and pairing it with shades of the Halloween Party and regular After Hours events. Basically, I would expect the material at Disney Villains After Hours to be totally fresh, but with a familiar tone and vibe.
As for whether Disney After Hours is worth the money, or is another hard ticket cash grab remains to be seen. The price is definitely steep, but so too are the normal After Hours and Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party tickets. The former was going to happen during this timeframe regardless, so if anything, Walt Disney World putting in the effort to enhance that ‘paid EMH’ event with new entertainment seems like a small victory. The proliferation of these events throughout the year at Magic Kingdom, and the corresponding decrease in daily operating hours, does remain very concerning.
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Your Thoughts
Are you excited for Disney Villains After Hours? Will you be attending the event? Do you agree or disagree with our perspective on this? Did you attend Villains Unleashed? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
So you do think this will be limited ticketing(like regular After Hours)? We are skipping MNSSHP bc of the crowds, but we love After Hours bc of the lack of crowds.
Hi Tom. What is your opinion on the fact that Disney is NOT offering chatacter meet and greets for this event? For me, the rare character interactions are the main selling point for events like MNSSHP, MVMCP, etc. For that price, I want to meet rare characters!!
With the “after hours” event trend it would appear that Disney is very quickly moving towards a scheduled access model. You will either visit the park during the day for one price, or if you are willing to double (or more) the amount you spend you will get access to the park at a lower crowd level with activities that use to be included with the “base” park ticket. I’ll pass.
I think you’re right about that being the business model, but I see it as a short term thing. Walt Disney World realizes guests are willing to spend big and pay big bucks for pricey surcharges because they feel good about the economy and their future prospects, or have fear of missing out (or perhaps both).
In the long term, I don’t see this being a viable strategy. On top of that, I think it’ll cause long-term damage, because people will look back and remember how expensive their trips were, and rule out WDW as a vacation destination. (Just look at how much those ‘Most Expensive Day Ever’ shirts have proliferated; that’s not the reputation Disney wants to have.)
Are there UK resident discounts?
How do you expect this to impact crowd levels? We were planning to be at MK on that first date listed, but may need to revise if it means the oark will be even busier that day.
In general my philosophy is that as of know there is no “light” days at Disney. The parks will always be crowded. This event appears to not start till 7, with the park closing at 10. I don’t think it’s going to have a massive effect.
I’m pretty sure these events extend the park hours till midnight exclusively for those at the event. Otherwise 140$ a ticket for 3 hours is an extremely excessive ticket cost.
We have a WDW trip planned August 10-16th… we are super bummed this is ending just before we arrive! We are coming from Wisconsin and are unable to go before that. We really wanted to try DAH, we missed it on our last trip:( Any idea if they are planning additional dates?
I doubt they’ll do it for your dates because MNSSHP will be starting. I don’t think they’d have After Hours and MNSSHP going on at the same time… but I could be wrong.
My family typically visits Disney World every other year and given the crowds as of late, we are willing to pay extra to experience the parks without crowds. Counting down the days until our trip!
I believe there was a time when some crazy arse online yahoo said that Disney would have Halloween parties in July if they could.
He even said that Disney was going to reduce if not eliminate EMH in favour of pay to play.
Well …
I read the column. I see the price points and the offerings. I see the conclusion with some tepid criticism of what having approximately 87 upcharge events a week, both morning and evening now, are doing to park hours to Guests paying ever increasing amounts to visit the Swamp Kingdom.
My question is simply: do you support these changes? Do you feel the ‘perceived’ value (and that is the accurate word as there is no real value) to a small to more audience that doesn’t know any better justifies the events?
At what point would it take for you to tell your flock to just say NO!?
I’ve just reached it WDW1974. We go for the last time in August. Family of 4 from the UK. Stay on site, DDP and will drop 10k on this holiday (our 4th) but won’t be going back. The cost vs crowds/queue times means its no longer viable. We’ll be splitting between on site a Universal and off-site next time. But even then it’ll be a few years away. May drop into DHS and Epcot for 1 day to see the finished results of SWGE etc. Not fussed about Tron. Its an off the shelf Intermin launch coaster and we have a few of them in the UK that are faster and better- Tron? What were they thinking? Dead films nobody went to see! Don’t blame Disney though – Its these stupid idiots who repeatedly pay the prices so they only have themselves to blame. If they didn’t sell they wouldn’t do it. With Paid FP+ on the way – there’s no point. I can queue for free all day in England!
Typical Disney lately………………. And that isn’t a compliment.
This is irritating at best. We swore off travel during MK party season (which is now nearly FIVE MONTHS long) because it’s difficult to coordinate around early MK closings and crowded non-party days, and started traveling in the summer for more predictable crowds, lack of festivals in Epcot, and longer regular park hours, but it seems like the longer park hours are being eliminated in favor of MORE special hard-ticketed events. The latest the MK is open during our week in June is 10 PM, with just one night of EMH until midnight. I was hopeful of maybe some 11 PM closings on non-EMH evenings, but now seeing this, I am skeptical, and slightly disappointed. My kids don’t stay up that late, but we are staying at Bay Lake Tower this trip in hopes of putting the kids to bed and the adults taking turns walking over to MK for late night fun. I’m wondering how many nights a week this will take place. Fingers crossed for maybe just one…
Well the first date coincides with when we’ll be there, so I think I’ll just have to experiment and take a chance on this!!!! kind of excited
Do you know/anyone have any thoughts on the target market for this event/ones like it? Are they trying to get more people from the nearby area in for these events vs. doing a regular day at the park?
Maybe its just me, but if you are a one time visitor or even once a year visitor I don’t get the appeal for this type of event. If you are already buying a multiday pass these events are taking value away from you because the park hours are getting shorter, and thee crowds are worse during those hours that are available. You could trade out a day and buy tickets to these events but you are still taking it on the nose because the additional days get cheaper vs. these are a high one time cost.
The holiday stuff makes more sense to me because assuming you took your trip to coincide with that time of the year, maybe its a another fun thing you want to do with your family? But around 600 dollars for a family of four when you’ve already dropped a lot of money just for the trip…to each his/her own I guess.
I am interested in the regular Disney After Hours at MK, but not this villains thing; partly because I am interested in innocent Disney World not Satanic Disney World (Hades!), and partly because my guess is that this event will be perceived as cool by many people and will have higher attendance with more tickets available than regular Disney After Hours, making for longer lines thereby reducing its appeal to me. Could be a big success for Disney; it’s just not for me.
I agree the shrinking regular park hours are concerning especially as we see ticket prices increase, and in many cases if we want earlier or later hours, we have to pay for additional events.
“The proliferation of these events throughout the year at Magic Kingdom, and the corresponding decrease in daily operating hours, does remain very concerning.”
That’s my main concern. Getting closer to the Disney dream of completely selling the park twice a day.
I wish they would release dates sooner, April 29th is within the 60day fastpass booking window for June 6th. This is one I would actually be interested in, but ADRs and FP already booked by then may make it impossible.
One correction for you. In your basics paragraph. You said there would be character meet and greets. According to the announcement on the parks blog there will not be any villain meet and greets. Can we anticipate longer attraction lines? Or will Disney change its mind.
Ah, you’re right. I misread that line in the DPB post, thinking it said that the villains in the show wouldn’t be doing meet & greets. I’ll correct the post.
Two thoughts- that’s a big price tag for a smaller day in the parks. And if Disney wants a party people will host for- have an evening party with no strollers or children under 18allowed and a few rare characters.
People would be climbing over themselves to buy tickets.
Do you think they’ll sell more tickets to these than the usual DAH? Like more akin to the Halloween and Christmas party crowds? Because most of the appeal of paying a premium for DAH is the incredibly low crowd levels. I hope this isn’t a cash grab to dilute that.
I know if low crowds were my primary concern, I wouldn’t attend the first two Villains After Hours parties and would wait on crowd reports from them.
I don’t know what Walt Disney World will do, but I could absolutely see more tickets being sold to these events–gotta pay for that added entertainment somehow!
Any idea when the dates will be released? This could change my plan for a first week of August visit.